Daniel Pope

Daniel Pope is co-founder of Submer, a Barcelona, Spain-based company that makes immersion cooling systems, in which servers sit in tanks of non-conductive fluid, and that now also designs and runs liquid-cooled data centers for AI. He started the company in 2015 with Pol Valls after a first career building and selling a data center business.

Growing Up in Britain and Spain

Pope was born in Switzerland, where his mother was working for the United Nations, and grew up in the United Kingdom until he was about nine, when the family moved to Barcelona, he said on the Not Your Father's Data Center podcast. He rowed competitively from a young age and won a rowing scholarship, according to Fierce Network.

Running Servers From a Bedroom in Barcelona, Spain

In 1999, at 16, he switched on a server in his bedroom to offer web hosting and email. The business grew fast in the dot-com boom, and he gave up plans to finish a computer science degree to run it. "I'm basically a self-taught tinkerer," he told Fierce Network, explaining that he learned data center design by building three or four facilities of his own. By the end of the 2000s the company ran more than 18,000 servers, and he sold it to the Telefónica group in 2009. He then worked for Odin and Ingram Micro Cloud.

Co-founding Submer With Pol Valls

The idea came on a 35-degree Celsius (95-degree Fahrenheit) summer day in 2015, when Pope and Valls, his brother-in-law, sat by a swimming pool and wondered what would happen if servers were cooled in a dielectric liquid. GPUs were pushing rack power beyond what air could cool, Pope said. The pair tested fluids that summer and built prototypes with retired industrial thermodynamics engineers, and they reached the final interview at Y Combinator before being turned down, according to TechCrunch. Submer launched its first commercial product, the SmartPod immersion tank, in 2018.

Waiting for Chipmakers to Back Immersion

Pope has been open that timing was Submer's hardest problem. "Timing is the biggest challenge for any startup or any new technology to market," he told Fierce Network in 2024. He described a "crazy chicken and egg challenge" in which server makers offer warranties for immersion-cooled equipment but most chip vendors do not, and he expects mass adoption once they do. He also opposes PFAS chemicals in cooling fluids and says Submer's single-phase systems use none.

Leading Submer's Push Into AI Data Centers

Patrick Smets later joined Submer as chief executive. In February 2025 the company said Pope would lead its new push into designing, building and operating liquid-cooled data centers and AI services, starting with a 56-megawatt facility of its own in Barcelona, according to the company announcement. Submer says it passed 500 megawatts of liquid-cooled deployments in 2025.